Services for which information is distributed through a communication network are generally referred to as network services. “Web services” are an example of network services, and represent the next generation of technology being used for automatically exchanging information between different applications over the public Internet and many private networks. Web services provide a framework for building web-based distributed applications, and can provide efficient and effective automated machine-to-machine communications.
From a technology point of view, web services are network accessible functions that can be accessed using standard Internet protocols such as HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP), eXtensible Markup Language (XML), Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), etc., over standard interfaces.
The real power of web services technology is in its simplicity. The core technology only addresses the common language and communication issues and does not directly address the onerous task of application integration. Web services can be viewed as a sophisticated machine-to-machine Remote Procedure Call (RPC) technology for interconnecting multiple heterogeneous untrusted systems. Web services take the best of many new technologies by utilizing XML technology for data conversion/transparency and Internet standards such as HTTP and Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) for message transport.
One of the primary drivers behind the development and standardization of web services is the ability to facilitate machine-to-machine communications by providing a loose coupling between disparate applications. This has the potential to drastically increase network utilization. While increasing utilization drives demand for network bandwidth, due to web services standards providing the ability to offer secure, reliable services directly over the Internet, much of this traffic will be directed over wholesale network interfaces. This can drive down per bit revenues of network operators and make it more difficult to differentiate higher margin, network-hosted services.
Web services are rapidly becoming the common method for new application development. This creates the opportunity for new revenue-generating data services based on web services interfaces. However, web services standards explicitly decouple both signaling and data from communication network infrastructure. Therefore, although web services standards facilitate the introduction of new data services and new revenue opportunities, they also make these new services more difficult to manage than controlled socket technologies used in Internet Protocol (IP) based services such as Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) based Voice over IP (VoIP). The lack of ability to monitor these services prevents network operators from performing such service-centric tasks as policing services in order to protect network infrastructure and providing value-added service capabilities such as network troubleshooting.
The ability to monitor and control network utilization by end-to-end application connections is available in some existing service networks. For example, Session Border Controllers (SBCs) are a type of network device used to provide some monitoring capabilities for SIP-based communications at network boundaries. However, existing SBCs are protocol specific and cannot parse or otherwise process service traffic.
Web services have started to appear in hosted service environments. Web services-based Service Delivery Platforms (SDPs) are application servers that have the capability to host and orchestrate third party web services. However, SDPs cannot monitor traffic between the third party and an end user unless the SDP actually orchestrates the service. While SDPs may allow network operators to deploy their own hosted web services and to provide a registry for third party services, they do not allow monitoring and control of services in which they do not participate. Providing a service-specific proxy for each third party web service would be one possible option, but does not scale profitably with high bit rate services or with an increasing number of service offerings.
Thus, there remains a need for improved monitoring of network services such as web services for communication networks.